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Reef Stonefish
*
“Thou know’st the first time we smell the air we wawl and cry.”
–King Lear
Shakespeare was right, of course. We come head-first into the world and, drawing our first breath in it, seem to intuit life’s pre-eminent lesson: we are entitled to precisely nothing — not food, not water, not toilet paper, and certainly not surgical masks and ventilators. And so it is that in our first few moments in the arena we give a great angry cry in protest — until someone sticks a tit in our mouths.
Which is a thing that doesn’t seem to change no matter how old we get.
The great success of western civilization in creating and sustaining comforts and freedoms has led us, perhaps, to believe we are entitled to them by virtue of some great beneficent dispensation of the cosmos. But we aren’t, and never have been, and as this pandemic flares and rages around the planet, taking lives and livelihoods with it, many are relearning – or discovering for the first time — the fundamental fragility of that assumption.
The pandemic-inspired awareness that we aren’t actually entitled to a damn thing — and that’s the only thing being “woke” can actually mean without irony — clashes fiercely with what we’ve been teaching generations of young people: that we are entitled to health and happiness, and if we just eat smoothies and talk nicer and recycle plastics we might even live forever.
The American mind in particular, it seems, has been trained to believe that we can somehow fight existential battles without casualties. That would have been news to General Grant, when he tucked in for dinner among the smoking ruins of Vicksburg. And here’s another flash: the kind of entitlement mindset we’ve been doubling-down on creates dependency, not resiliency, and that’s really bad news for all of us.
*
I had a civics teacher in high school, Walt Adams, who once told our class that he did not believe in abortions unless they were post-natal. He thought we should give people about 16 years and then decide whether or not to whack them. He didn’t mention a preferred method but he managed to wedge that commentary in between lessons on the role of the Federal Reserve and a glowing assessment of G. Gordon Liddy’s general comportment.
Walt was also my wrestling coach and wore the magic Mormon underwear so it was hard to take him very seriously. Once, when I was losing a match I should have been winning — by a lot — he threw up his hands and thundered in exasperation: “You’re rolling over like a tired whore!” which more or less silenced the gym.
It’s amazing what you can hear out on the mat in the middle of a match, what with the heavy breathing and the auditory exclusion that comes from the body’s belief it is engaged in mortal combat, but I heard Walt clearly and was inspired enough by the comment to eventually win. When I walked off the mat he just threw me a laconic smile and marched away to coach some other wrestler off the broad path to avoidable defeat.
When sea turtles hatch they know only one thing: get off the beach. 1 in 1000 survives even a year.
One of the great recent hubbubs has been the notion of “Dying for the Dow,” or what has been dubbed “The Deathwish Economy.” This freak-out, and there have been many of a similar strain, was sparked by Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, who is probably an asshole and managed — and clearly this wasn’t advisable — to tell some television pundit: “I don’t want the whole country to be sacrificed… we can’t lose our whole country … let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living.”
Patrick was suggesting that seniors would be willing to die in human waves on the hilltops of Covid-19 to resurrect a virus-bund economy. This comment sparked a furious overreaction from nervous people across America who still take their politicians far too seriously. I suppose that’s understandable if we remember they once handed out infected blankets to natives. The comment was clearly and utterly stupid, and reminded me instantly of Lt. Henry Harrick — who had previously announced his intention to bring home the Medal of Honor — and with glory in his eyes led his platoon to unnecessary death and disaster in the opening moments of the fight for the Ia Drang Valley.
At any rate, after Patrick was done terrifying old people “Triage” memes suddenly flooded the internet and aging Baby Boomers — what one of my friends has called “The Lamest Generation” — began clutching their virtue pearls as if some twitchy National Guardsman was going to prise them out of their houses — away from their carefully hoarded mountains of toilet paper and Spam — to float the Dow-Jones on a raft of their dead and infected bodies.
I’m trying to model my present behavior on the Stonefish, which is the most venomous fish in the world. If you happen to step on one the pain, swelling, spasms, and paralysis are apparently so excruciating that they create delirium and occasionally unconsciousness. This has caused some people to drown. On a brighter note if they don’t kill you outright the symptoms can persist for months. I’ve been pushing for Badger Theory elsewhere but in a pandemic I’m going full Stonefish. I’m tucked into the reef here, covered with some sand, just watching the other fish swim by.
Reactions to this pandemic have been all over the map, and generally uninspiring, but also instructive for those of us who believe another such offering is probably just a few years down the road. One must embrace the notion that right now some kid in a Wuhan Province wet market is deciding whether or not he wants to snack on a marmot’s sautéed butthole.
At any rate, not long ago I passed on a golden chance to secure six months of Mountain House freeze dried meals at a considerable discount, which was a mistake I won’t repeat.
One interesting note in the general symphonic calamity has been the fortissimo swell of Trump derangement. It’s astonishing to see so many otherwise intelligent people let this clown live rent free in their heads. I get it, they want somebody to blame, and they still believe the US government is meant to be their friend, but it gets tiresome. There are some, far too many, who long ago invited Trump into their house and are now surprised to find he is drinking all the beer, kicking their dog, and humping their wife while they sit tied to a chair with extension cords.
The President of the United States
And anyway, if there is a God who manages our various absurdities, Joe Biden will ascend to the throne come November — if only because momentum and the weight of history seem to demand that we elect a man with obvious dementia.
I once served on a security detail for Uncle Joe. This was years ago, before his gears started publicly slipping. He landed in Santa Barbara and raced down the 101 into Montecito where he spent about an hour passing a velvet hat amongst the various Harvey Weinstein types who lived there. This was before the mudslide which carried some of those fine Spanish Colonials across the railroad tracks and into the sea.
While Joe was inside regaling the rapt with a breathless retelling of his battles with Corn Pop, I sat outside sweating in an armored vehicle with my compadres, fondling a three thousand dollar rifle and waiting for terrorists or nutjobs to jump out of the iceplant. That never happened — which was disappointing — but as quickly as he had landed he was off again, his pockets stuffed full of checks, jetting into a beautiful blue sky over San Marcos Pass where the hide wagons once trundled in from Rancho San Fernando Rey. The Californios would carry the hides down to the beach and load them in the holds of the ships until they were full, and then stand by as the ships weighed anchor and sailed away — back ’round the Horn to the east coast where the rights of sailors were few and the leather was made into belts and shoes.
Two hundred years after the hide ships patrolled that part of the coast, my partners and I sat on a hill covered in licorice plant, watching Uncle Joe fly back to his grind on a government jet. We didn’t say much about any of it. But we did stay there for a while, padding our own checks where the air was fumed with the smell of eucalyptus trees, and of the crude oil that seeps up from cracks in the channel floor — leaving a rainbow sheen, here and there, on the ancient waters.
Matthew says
I hope that this pandemic makes some people realize how the world actually works. MAYBE some good will come out of it. The world doesn’t owe you anything. It was here first.
The entitlement culture is hard to bear though it’s human nature to start to believe that if you keep getting something for free you begin to believe you are entitled to it. There’s a book by Donald Westlake called Money for Nothing about a man who mysteriously get money in the mail he does not know where it come from. After awhile he takes it for granted that he deserves. When he finds out what the money is for the story starts.
That’s an interesting story about Uncle Joe.
There is an opportunity for us all to learn some lessons, though in the present climate of “Who Shot Johnny” those opportunities dim while the political titheads jockey for perceived advantages. I remain optimistic. Pragmatic. But optimistic. Thanks for being here and stay healthy.
That was a good un, pardner.
Thanks brother.
And the Shakespeare reference reminded me of this — Tim Willocks on Shakespeare:
Shakespeare is the one and only writer whose balls are so large they make my own feel small. He goes all the way, time after time. Right to the end of the line. Total darkness, total loss, total tragedy, total death. He did not spare his characters in any way, and he took them on the longest journeys of any other writer.
For instance, Macbeth begins as the noblest knight of the kingdom – he’s Galahad. By the end of the play, he’s Pol Pot. King Lear starts as the most powerful man in the world; at the end, he is an insane beggar in rags, with everyone he ever loved dead. Titus Andronicus begins as Rome’s greatest general, and ends with 20 of 21 sons dead, kills his own daughter (“DIE!”), and serves a mother her two sons cooked in a pie. Othello is the perfect man…until he strangles his wife in insane jealousy. Hamlet starts as a confused, immature, semi-crazed adolescent, and ends a wise man – who at that very moment is killed. Not even Romeo and Juliet – two sweet teenagers – get out alive. Etc, etc.
He also created the original all-time-great killing-machine motherfuckers: Macbeth, Titus, Coriolanus. And these are just his tragedies. I am not even going to mention his comedies and histories.
I also love the incredible boldness of his plots. He wasn’t afraid of anything, no matter how absurd. Richard III is a preposterous story in a dozen different ways, but he didn’t give a fuck: and it works brilliantly. He wasn’t shackled by modern notions of motivation and plausibility; he was only interested in truth, action, the human soul, especially at its darkest. And his audience had the stomach for those truths, whereas we seem like sheep trembling inside a fence built of comforting lies.
Perfect. Fucking perfect.
Breaker Morant (David Wrolson) says
As the resident George MacDonald Fraser nerd, I have to ask if either of you (or anyone else) is familiar with the Shakespeare commentary portion of “Quartered Safe Out Here.” That alone is well worth the book (a memoir of the war in Burma).
Suffice to say, an old soldier of 30 years service in Fraser’s unit commandeered his copy of Henry V and was absolutely convinced that the old bard had seen military action. Most scholars say no, but Fraser said ever after he wondered if Shakespeare was in the army.
Hell, maybe Shakespeare was seeing through a glass darkly, or as I put it, smelling the smoke of past campfires, and it is an argument for past lives.
Yes I am. That happens to be one of my favorite books of all time. I also happen to think it is one of the best memoirs anyone has ever written. Thanks for the reminder.
John M Roberts says
I lived in Montecito for a couple of years, on Romero Canyon Road. Needless to say, I didn’t own the house. My aunt did. She was a girl from small-town southern Texas who married very, very well during WWII. The trainee pilot she’d met and dated turned out to be the scion of a Chicago family with vast holdings in Wisconsin forests and a business too complicated to explain here, except to note that my uncle’s uncle had invented, of all things, the self-locking egg carton. My uncle piloted a B‑17 and was shot down, ditching in the North Sea. Taken captive, he spent the remainder of the war in Stalag Luft 3. Not long after being repatriated, he was diagnosed with MS, I watched that disease kill that excellent man for 30+ years.
All of which led me to be living on Romero Canyon Drive in the late ’70s, where I wrote several books and jogged obsessively, usually at least 10 miles a day some times as much as 20, which is probably why my knees are so wrecked now, Sometimes I’d nod to Michael as we passed each other. It was that kind of place.
All of which seems to lead me to whatever the point of this thing is. Most of us here seem to share a sort of odd synchronicity in time nd place: Me and Jum C in Pasadena in the 50s, me and you in Montecito in the late 70s. Significant? Maybe.
John M Roberts says
Meant to say that was Michael Douglas I nodded to while jogging.
Santa Bruta and Montecito maintain that vibe. The celebrity encounters are common and generally pleasant. And yet two blocks away gangsters are stabbing each other to death over an ounce of meth. It’s a strange and wonderful place. Romero Canyon is heavenly although fire and mudslides have taken a brutal toll. Thanks for being here, stay healthy.
Traven Torsvan says
Millions of people dying thanks to oligarchs and politicians ignoring experts in favour of their own ideological crusade sound a lot like a totalitarian regime, like Venezuela which we hear nonstop about, btw in the midst of all this the U.S has now offered a reward for the head of Nicholas Maduro for something called “Narcoterrorism” whatever that is, along with selling drugs to suburban kids, white slaving, consorting with the devil and corrupting the youth of Athens as well.
I have been to some totalitarian countries and ours ain’t one. Not yet, anyway. If it were we wouldn’t be exchanging thoughts like this on a website or getting spun over 6 trillion dollar relief packages. North Korea, where there is, officially, no coronavirus, is a different story. Narcoterrorism is Mexico, where entire states are held hostage to narcotrafficantes and dissenters frequently turned into pozole. It is a more or less straight line from the super labs of Culiacan to the armed robberies, burglaries, murders, and every other Type 1 crime in North America and elsewhere. There can be very little doubt that Maduro, while his people eat trash, reaps huge rewards by pressing the scales of the underground empire in his favor. After all, he’s got Cuban troops to lend him muscle, and Russian/Chinese political cover. Whether its our job to do something about that is questionable, but that he’s involved in trafficking and thereby all of the other horrors that result from it, everywhere drugs are sold, really isn’t.
Jim says
If Fidel Castro, the pure and untarnished patriarch of the Bernie Sanders socialist dream, can die with $800 million in his personal bank account, then it seems quite reasonable that Maduro is ripping his country off blind with more oil reserves then most places in the world.
Breaker Morant (David Wrolson) says
Jim»>“If Fidel Castro, the pure and untarnished patriarch of the Bernie Sanders socialist dream, can die with $800 million in his personal bank account, then it seems quite reasonable that Maduro is ripping his country off blind with more oil reserves then most places in the world”.«<
A few years ago, I found a blog by an oil guy and I remember he was heart-broken at the thought of how badly the awesome oil fields in Venezuela were being treated. He figured they were being damaged permanently through over pumping or whatever.
Jim says
I woke up this morning in a foul mood for some reason. Picked a meaningless fight with my wife and promptly apologized as per regulations. I decided it was safe to make a dump run and run a few errands.
Still, the mood lingered and I can only equate it to the hangover I had watching the first gulf war on television. All the IR weapon systems that made war into a video game. It was captivating. But after three weeks my brain was fried and I was chronically irritated. So I have vowed to turn off the news entirely. We’ll see.
I would like to first add that while irritated I arrived at the local supermarket and proceeded to read this blog entry.. It had me laughing so hard at the thought of sautéed marmot buttholes that I looked like a chuckling idiot sitting in the cab of my truck while apparently healthy people walked past me with surgical masks on. There are 50 cases of Covid in the entire state of Maine. Surreal. So, thanks for the laugh.
I think the biggest reason for my irritation has been the constant barrage of doomsaying. It is clearly with the journalistic mantra of “if it bleeds it leads”. That doomsaying has cornered everyone who may have an opinion about whether destroying the American economy wholesale is an absolute necessity because an unknown number people will die of this flu, or more importantly, die primarily from a number of underlying ailments due to the complications from this flu. I did a little math, 2.7 million people die on average in the US per year. That’s 7,500 per day from all causes. I don’t remember them reporting on those. It may be harsh, but I’ll live by the same harshness. The old BS smarmy comment of “if it saves one life“ just doesn’t cut muster.
I guess it wouldn’t bother me so much except the driving force by some is to transform government in our lives. There are too many people believing that the world started five minutes ago. They argue that if they don’t feel happy at this very moment it’s because the world is a very bad no good place, and someone is responsible to make them happy again.
So, thanks for a healthy dose of sarcastic realism. I knew I could count on you. You made me happy again!
So glad I could be helpful 🙂 I have a tendency to crack myself up and so my wife thinks I’m touched, but it’s a relief to know someone else got a laugh over that. This: “I think the biggest reason for my irritation has been the constant barrage of doomsaying.” They didn’t need much prompting, but the chicken littles in the largely leftist media are off the hook and really damaging. ZERO chance they find a silver lining anywhere and not the people I want to share a fighting hole with. They have only mode: hate trump, blame trump, trump bad, trump no good, we are all going to die. That’s actually enough for an entire evening news broadcast — and I haven’t even started with print journalism where, only two weeks ago, the WaPo was proclaiming this virus as no big deal. Also, Mike Pence is killing people because he can’t snap his fingers and 3‑D print enough ventilators to save everyone in the world. It’s just stupid and as tiresome as the “Who Shot Johnny” bullshit that always destroys every tactical debrief where lessons can be learned.
Breaker Morant (David Wrolson) says
I thought of you Craig when I ran across drone video of a British police video attempting to shame people for exercising in the remoter areas of the Peak district.
I think this backfired big time on them as most comments seemed along the line of there would be no better place to exercise as there was nobody around.
However, you had a few (Statist Ninnies?) who were against people taking this freedom as “They might get in a car accident on the way there” or “They might turn an ankle and require rescue.” Obviously, ignoring the fact that you can twist an ankle stepping off a curb, or the problem of social distancing in a more crowded section of town or whatever.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-derbyshire-52055201
deuce says
Great post, Craig!
That was also a fine Willocks quote on Shakespeare. Pure gold. Thanks for that, Jim.
Jim says
Had to share this. Apparently, there are a few stonefish living up here in Maine as well! Brilliant!! Those people who are “from away”…
https://www.foxnews.com/us/maine-coronavirus-armed-vigilantes-chop-down-tree-block-driveway-force-neighbor-quarantine